Book ReviewL Dr Koop – The many lives of the Surgeon General
Author– Nigel M De S Cameron
Massachusetts Press 2025
Amazon Price £143 (Hardcover)
Which paediatric surgeon wore the full-dress uniform of a Vice-Admiral in the United States Navy and had all the bearing of an Old Testament Prophet?
It could only be Charles Everett Koop (1916 -2013), an amazing man with an amazing life. Better known to his friends as “Chick” – as in Koop (geddit). Nigel M de S Cameron (of Scottish origins but now firmly a naturalized American) wrote this biography to detail the life of a truly great man.
Of course, to our paediatric surgical community he was a noted friend of the BAPS, an Overseas Member, the 4th Denis Browne Gold Medallist (1971) travelling over here for many Congresses during the 1960s and 70s and counting Bob Zachary (Sheffield) and Peter Paul Rickham (Liverpool) as friends and confidantes. He started life as part of the American 2nd wave of exclusively paediatric surgeons at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) in the 1940s and notably designed the in-continuity ileostomy for use in babies with meconium ileus with Harry Bishop (d 2009). He was also an early adopter of Dr Kasai’s portoenterostomy for biliary atresia and began the CHOP programme for the separation of conjoined twins. He was also the first editor of the Journal of Pediatric Surgery in 1966. So much achieved and yet his real career only took off on retiring in 1980. A lesson to us all..
He was plucked out of political obscurity by the 40th President, Ronald Reagan, to be the Surgeon General of the USA – the only paediatric surgeon to so serve. A staunch evangelical Christian with a face and visage to match, and probably because of his “pro-life” views in the many convulsions the American state likes to subject itself to. He actually surprised many people as a rational person arguing not only for a more moral approach and better understanding but also for a caring empathetic response to the AIDS epidemic then sweeping through the USA as it did through the rest of the world during his two terms during the 1980s. In the eyes of many of his countryman he became THE Surgeon General, railing against Big Tobacco, with health warnings on cigarette packs and the like and kick-starting the long decline of man’s addiction to tobacco and its products.
However, as the 1990s brought the Bush and Clinton administrations into being, and now out of any formal government role he could not let the persona he had built up fade away. He became “America’s Family Doctor” and grasping the importance of health informatics he set up the drkoop.com website at the age of 82 years, only to see it crash and burn a few years later in a welter of debt, backbiting and overoptimism.
Comments, as usual, are welcome.
Prof Mark Davenport ChM FRCS(Paeds)